Vietnamese Civil War of 1772-1802

The Tay Son Rebellion (1771-1802), which ends the Le and Trinh dynasties, is led by three brothers from the village of Tay Son in Binh Dinh Province.

The brothers, who are of the Ho clan (to which Ho Quy Ly had belonged), adopt the name Nguyen.

The eldest brother, Nguyen Nhac, begins an attack on the ruling Nguyen family by capturing Quang Nam and Binh Dinh provinces in 1772.

The chief principle and main slogan of the Tay Son is "seize the property of the rich and distribute it to the poor."

In each village the Tay Son control, oppressive landlords and scholar-officials are punished and their property redistributed.

The Tay Son also abolish taxes, burn the tax and land registers, free prisoners from local jails, and distribute the food from storehouses to the hungry.

As the rebellion gathers momentum, it gains the support of army deserters, merchants, scholars, local officials, and bonzes.

Nguyen Anh adopts the reign name Gia Long in June 1802 to express the unifying of the country—Gia from Gia Dinh (Saigon) and Long from Thang Long (Hanoi).

As a symbol of this unity, Gia Long changes the name of the country from Dai Viet to Nam Viet.

For the Chinese, however, this is too reminiscent of the wayward General Trieu Da.

In conferring investiture on the new government, the Chinese invert the name to Viet Nam, the first use of this name for the country.

Acting as a typical counterrevolutionary government, the Gia Long regime harshly suppresses any forces opposing it or the interests of the bureaucracy and the landowners.

In his drive for control and order, Gia Long adopts the Chinese bureaucratic model to a greater degree than any previous Vietnamese ruler.

The new capital at Hue, two kilometers northeast of Phu Xuan, is patterned after the Chinese model in Beijing, complete with a Forbidden City, an Imperial City, and a Capital City.

Vietnamese bureaucrats are required to wear Chinese-style gowns and even adopt Chinese-style houses and sedan chairs.

Vietnamese women, in turn, are compelled to wear Chinese-style trousers.

Gia Long institutes a law code, which follows very closely the Chinese Qing dynasty (1644-1911) model.

Under the Gia Long code, severe punishment is meted out for any form of resistance to the absolute power of the government.

Buddhism, Taoism, and indigenous religions are forbidden under the Confucianist administration.

Traditional Vietnamese laws and customs, such as the provisions of the Hong Due law code protecting the rights and status of women, are swept away by the new code.

Taxes that had been reduced or abolished under the Tay Son are levied again under the restored Nguyen dynasty.

These include taxes on mining, forestry, fisheries, crafts, and on various domestic products, such as salt, honey, and incense.

Another heavy burden on the peasantry is the increased use of corvée labor to build not only roads, bridges, ports, and irrigation works but also palaces, fortresses, shipyards, and arsenals.

All but the privileged classes are required to work on such projects at least sixty days a year, with no pay but a rice ration.

The great Mandarin Road, used by couriers and scholar-officials as a link between Gia Dinh, Hue, and Thang Long, is started during this period in order to strengthen the control of the central government.

Military service is another burden on the peasantry; in some areas one out of every three men is required to serve in the Vietnamese Imperial Army.

Land reforms instituted under the Tay Son Are soon lost under the restored Nguyen dynasty, and the proportion of communal lands dwindles to less than twenty percent of the total.

Although chu nom is retained as the national script by Gia Long, his son and successor Minh Mang, who gains the throne upon his father's death in 1820, orders a return to the use of Chinese ideographs.

Quang Trung dies in 1792, without leaving a successor strong enough to assume leadership of the country, and the usual factionalism ensues.

By this time, Nguyen Anh and his supporters have won back much of the south from Nguyen Lu, the youngest and least capable of the Tay Son brothers.

When Pigneau de Behaine returns to Vietnam in 1789, Nguyen Anh is in control of Gia Dinh.

In the succeeding years, the bishop brings Nguyen Anh a steady flow of ships, arms, and European advisers, who supervise the building of forts, shipyards, cannon foundries and bomb factories, and instruct the Vietnamese in the manufacture and use of modern armaments.

Nguyen's cause is also greatly aided by divisions within the Tay Son leadership, following the death of Quang Trung, and the inability of the new leaders to deal with the problems of famine and natural disasters that wrack the war-torn country.

After a steady assault on the north, Nguyen Anh's forces take Phu Xuan in June 1801 and Thang Long a year later.

Quang Trung stimulates Vietnam's war-ravaged economy by encouraging trade and crafts, ordering the recultivation of fallow lands, reducing or abolishing taxes on local products, and resettling landless peasants on communal lands in their own villages.

Quang Trung also establishes a new capital at Phu Xuan (near modern Hue), a more central location from which to administer the country.

He reorganizes the government along military lines, giving key posts to generals, with the result that military officials for the first time outrank civilian officials.

Vietnamese is substituted for Chinese as the official national language, and candidates for the bureaucracy are required to submit prose and verse compositions in chu nom rather than in classical Chinese.

The Tay Son have in the meantime overcome the crumbling Trinh dynasty by 1786 and seized all of the north, thus uniting the country for the first time in two hundred years.

The Tay Son make good their promise to restore the Le dynasty, at least for ceremonial purposes.

The three Nguyen brothers install themselves as kings of the north, central, and southern sections of the country, respectively, while continuing to acknowledge the Le emperor in Thang Long.

In 1788, however, the reigning Le emperor flees north to seek Chinese assistance in defeating the Tay Son.

Eager to comply, a Chinese army of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) invades Vietnam, seizes Thang Long, and invests the Le ruler as "King of Annam."

This same year, the second eldest Tay Son brother, Nguyen Hue, proclaims himself Emperor Quang Trung.

Marching north with one hundred thousand men and one hundred elephants, Quang Trung attacks Thang Long at night and routs the Chinese army of two hundred thousand, which retreats in disarray.

Immediately following his victory, the Tay Son leader seeks to reestablish friendly relations with China, requesting recognition of his rule and sending the usual tributary mission.

Nguyen Nhac seizes Qui Nhon, which becomes the Tay Son capital, in 1773.

By 1778 the Tay Son have effective control over the southern part of the country, including Gia Dinh (later Saigon).

The ruling Nguyen family are all killed by the Tay Son rebels, with the exception of Nguyen Anh, the sixteen-year-old nephew of the last Nguyen lord, who escapes to the Mekong Delta.

There he is able to gather a body of supporters and retake Gia Dinh.

The city changes hands several times until 1783, when the Tay Son brothers destroy Nguyen Anh's fleet and drive him to take refuge on Phu Quoc Island.

Soon thereafter, he meets with French missionary bishop Pigneau de Behaine and asks him to be his emissary in obtaining French support to defeat the Tay Son.

Pigneau de Behaine takes Nguyen Anh's five-year-old son, Prince Canh, and departsfor Pondichery in French India to plead for support for the restoration of the Nguyen.

Finding none there, he goes to Paris in 1786 to lobby on Nguyen Anh's behalf.

Louis XVI ostensibly agrees to provide four ships, sixteen hundred and fifty men, and supplies in exchange for Nguyen Anh's promise to cede to France the port of Tourane (Da Nang) and the island of Poulo Condore.

However, the local French authorities in India, under secret orders from the king, refuse to supply the promised ships and men.

Determined to see French military intervention in Vietnam, Pigneau de Behaine himself raises funds for two ships and supplies from among the French merchant community in India, hires deserters from the French navy to man them, and sails back to Vietnam in 1789.

Vietnam is under the nominal rule of the officially revered, but politically ignored Lê Dynasty during the eighteenth century.

Real power is in the hands of two warring feudal families, the Trịnh Lords of the north, who control and rule from the imperial court in Hanoi, and ...

...the Nguyen Lords in the south, who rule from their capital, Huế.

Both sides fight each other for control of the nation, while claiming to be loyal to the king.

Life for the peasant farmers is difficult.

Ownership of land has become more concentrated in the hands of a few landlords as time has passed.

The Mandarin bureaucracy is oppressive and often corrupt; at one point, royally sanctioned degrees are put up for sale for whoever is wealthy enough to purchase them.

In contrast to the people, the ruling lords live lavish lifestyles in huge palaces.

The decades-long war between the Trịnh and the Nguyen had ended in 1673, and life for the northern peasants is fairly peaceful.

However, the Nguyen Lords have engaged in a regular series of wars with the weak Khmer Empire, and later, the relatively strong state of Siam.

While the Nguyen usually win, and despite the fact that the new lands they conquer offer new opportunities for the landless poor, the frequent wars take a toll on their popularity.

Taksin, the new king of Siam, launches a war in 1769 to regain control of Cambodia.

The war generally goes against the Nguyen and they are forced to abandon some of the newly conquered lands.

This failure, coupled with heavy taxes and corruption at the local level, causes three brothers from the village of Tay Son to begin a revolt against Lord Nguyen Phúc Thuần.

The Tay Son brothers style themselves as champions of the people.

Over the next year, the revolt gains traction and they win some battles against the Nguyen army units sent to crush their rebellion.

The Tay Son have a great deal of popular support, not only from the poor farmers, but from some of the indigenous highland tribes.

The leader of the three brothers, Nguyen Huệ, is also a very skilled military leader.

Nguyễn Huệ’s stated goal is to end the people's oppression, reunite the country, and restore the power of the Lê emperor in Hanoi.

The Tây Son also promise to remove corrupt officials and redistribute land.

In 1773 the Tay Son capture the port of Qui Nhon, where the merchants, who have suffered under restrictive laws put in place by the Nguyen, give the uprising financial support.

The Nguyen, at last recognizing the serious scale of the revolt, make peace with the Siamese, giving up some land they had conquered in previous decades.

However, their problems are compounded when Trịnh Sam chooses to end the one hundred-year peace and exploit the turmoil in the south by sending his army to attack Phú Xuân (modern day Huế), the Nguyen capital.

The Trịnh army captures the city, forcing the Nguyen to flee to Gia Định (later called Saigon).

The Trịnh army continues to head south and the Tay Son army continues its conquest of other southern cities.

The Nguyen are unpopular at this time, and the forces against them are too powerful.

The Tay Son army captures Gia Định, the last Nguyen stronghold, in 1776, and massacres the town's Han Chinese population.

The entire Nguyen family is killed at the end of the siege, except for one nephew, Nguyen Ánh, who manages to escape to Siam.

While they say they want to restore power to the Lê, one of the brothers, Nguyen Nhạc, proclaims himself Emperor in 1778.

A conflict with the Trịnh is thus unavoidable.